The Lone Pilgrim

by Laurie Colwin

  Lionel was my natural other. Stoned we were four eyes and one mind. We were simply made to get high together—we felt exactly the same way about dope. We liked to light up and perambulate around the mental landscape seeing what we could see. We often liked to glom onto the Jill and Bill Show—that was what we called one of the campus’s married couples, Jill and Bill Benson. Jill and Bill lived off campus, baked their own bread, made their own jam and candles, and knitted sweaters for each other. Both of them were extremely rich and were fond of giving parties at which dreadful homemade hors d’oeuvres and cheap wine were served. Linnie and I made up a Broadway musical for them to star in. It was called Simple on My Trust Fund. We worked mostly on the opening scene. Jill and Bill are in the kitchen of their horrid apartment. Jill is knitting. Bill is stirring a pot of jam. A group of ordinary students walks by the open window. “Jill and Bill,” they say. “How is it that you two live such a groovy, cool, and close-to-the-earth life?”

  Jill and Bill walk to center stage, holding hands. “Simple,” each coos. “On my trust fund.” And the chorus breaks into the lovely refrain. Once in the coffee shop Jill confessed to Linnie that she only had “a tiny little trust fund.” This phrase was easily worked into the Jill and Bill Show.

  Jill and Bill, however, appeared to be having something of a hard time. They were seen squabbling. Jill was seen in tears at the Shop-Up. They looked unhappy. Jill went off skiing by herself. I had very little patience with Jill and Bill. I felt that with all that money they ought to buy some machine-made sweaters and serve store-bought jam. Furthermore, I felt it was slumming of them to live in such a crummy apartment when the countryside was teeming with enchanting rural properties. The idea of a country house became a rallying cry—the answer to all of Jill and Bill’s trouble.

  Linnie mused on Jill and Bill. What could be their problem, he wondered, rolling a colossal joint.

  “They’re both small and dark,” I said. Linnie lit up and passed the joint to me. I took a life-affirming hit. “Maybe at night they realize what they look like and in the morning they’re too depressed to relate to each other. What do you think?”

  “I think Jill and Bill are a form of matted plant fiber,” said Linnie. “I think they get into bed and realize that more than any other single thing, they resemble that stuff those braided doormats are made of. This clearly has a debilitating effect on them. This must be what’s wrong. What do you think, Mrs. Ann?”

  “A country house,” I said. “They must buy a lovely country house before it’s too late.”

  That was the beginning of Ask Mrs. Ann, a routine in which Linnie and I would invent some horrible circumstance for Jill and Bill. Either of us could be Mrs. Ann. It didn’t matter which. One of us would say, for instance: “Answer this one, Mrs. Ann. Jill and Bill have just had a baby. This baby is a Negro baby, which is odd since neither Jill nor Bill is Negro. Naturally, this causes a bit of confusion. They simply cannot fathom how it happened. At any rate, this baby has webbed feet and tiny flippers. Jill finds this attractive. Bill less so. Meanwhile Jill has bought a sheep and a loom. It is her girlish dream to spin wool from her own sheep, but the sheep has gone berserk and bitten Bill. In the ensuing melee the loom has collapsed, dislocating Jill’s shoulder. Meanwhile, Bill, who has had to have forty stitches in his thigh as the result of violent sheep bite, has gone into the hospital for a simple tonsillectomy and finds to his amazement that his left arm has been amputated—he is left-handed as you recall. Jill feels they ought to sue, but to Bill’s shock, he finds that he has signed a consent to an amputation. How can this have happened? He simply can’t fathom it. But there is relief in all this, if only for Jill. Jill, whose maiden name is Michaelson, suffers from a rare disorder called ‘Michaelson’s Syndrome,’ which affects all members of her family. This syndrome causes the brain to turn very slowly into something resembling pureed spinach. By the time she is thirty she will remember nothing of these unhappy events, for she will have devolved to a rather primitive, excrement-throwing stage. Whatever should they do?”

  All that was required of Mrs. Ann was the rallying cry: a country house! Many hours were spent trying to find new awful tidings for Jill and Bill, and as those familiar with the effects of marijuana know, even the punctual are carried away on a stream of warped time perceptions. One rock-and-roll song takes about an hour to play, whereas a movement of a symphony is over in fifteen seconds. I felt that time had a form—the form of a chiffon scarf floating aimlessly down a large water slide; or that it was oblong but slippery, like an oiled football. I got home late, having forgotten to do the shopping. Since I had freely opted to be Thorne’s housewife, he was perfectly justified in getting angry with me. My problem was, he thought I was having an affair.

  It is one thing to tell your husband that you are sleeping with another man, and it is quite another to tell him that from the very instant of your meeting you have been under the influence of a mind-altering substance, no matter how mild. An astonishing confession next to which the admission of an afternoon or two in the arms of another man is nothing. Nothing!

  What was I to do? My only real talent in life appeared to be getting high, and I was wonderful at it. Ostensibly I was supposed to be nurturing a talent for drawing—everyone had a skill, it was assumed. Every day I went upstairs to our attic room, lit a joint, and drew tiny, incoherent, and highly detailed black and white pictures. This was not my idea of an occupation. It was hardly my idea of a hobby. Of course it is a well-known fact that drawing while high is always fun which only made it more clear to me that my true vocation lay in getting stoned.

  And so when dinner was late, when I was late, when I had forgotten to do something I had said I would do, Thorne liked to get into a snit, but he was terrified of getting furious with me. After all, my role was to look sort of dangerous. In some ways, Thorne treated me with the respectful and careful handling you might give to something you suspect is a pipe bomb: he didn’t want to tempt fate because the poor thing was in some ways enraptured with me and he was afraid that if he got mad enough, I might disappear. That was the way the scales of our marriage were balanced. When he looked as if he were about to shout, I would either get a very dangerous look in my eyes, or I would make him laugh, which was one of my prime functions in his life. The other was to behave in public.

  Since I was stoned all the time, I tried in all ways to behave like Queen Victoria. Thus I probably appeared to be a little cracked. At public functions I smiled and was mute—no one knew that at home I was quite a little chatterbox. The main form of socializing on campus was the dinner party. I found these pretty funny—of course I was high and didn’t know the difference. Thorne found them pretty dull, so I tried to liven them up for him. If we were seated together at dinner, I would smile at the person opposite and then do something to Thorne under the table. I tended, at these parties, to smile a great deal. This unnerved Thorne. He wore, under his party expression, a grimace that might have been caused by constant prayer, the prayer that I would not say something I had said at home. That I would not talk about how a black transvestite hooker should be sent as a present to the president of the college for his birthday. He prayed that I would not say about this gift: “With my little inheritance and Thorne’s salary I think we could certainly afford it.” Or I would not discuss the ways in which I felt the chairman of the history department looked like an anteater, or, on the subject of ants, how I felt his wife would react to being rolled in honey and set upon by South American fire ants. I did think that Professor X stole women’s clothing out of the townie laundromat and went through the streets late at night in a flowered housecoat. I knew why Professor Y should not be left alone with his own infant son, and so on. But I behaved like a perfect angel and from time to time sent Thorne a look that made him shake, just to keep him on his toes.

  I actually spoke once. This was at a formal dinner at the chairman of the department’s house. This dinner party was so unusually dull that even through a glaz
e of marijuana I was bored. Thorne looked as if he were drowning. I myself began to itch. When I could stand it no longer I excused myself and went to the bathroom where I lit the monster joint I carried in my evening bag and took a few hits. This was Lionel’s superfine Colombian loco-weed and extremely effective. When I came downstairs I felt all silvery. The chairman of the department’s wife was talking about her niece, Allison, who was an accomplished young equestrienne. At the mention of horses, I spoke up. I remembered something about horses I had figured out high. Lionel Browning called these insights “marijuana moments”—things you like to remember when you are not stoned. Since no one had ever heard me say very much, everyone stopped to listen.

  “Man’s spatial relationship to the horse is one of the most confusing and deceptive in the world,” I heard myself say. “You are either sitting on top of one, or standing underneath one, and therefore it is impossible to gauge in any meaningful way exactly how big a horse is in relationship to you. This is not,” I added with fierce emphasis, “like a man inside a cathedral.”

  I then shut up. There was a long silence. I meditated on what I had said which was certainly the most interesting thing anyone had said. Thorne’s eyes seemed about to pop. There was not a sound. People had stopped eating. I looked around the table, gave a beautiful, unfocused smile, and went back to my dinner.

  Finally, the chairman of the department’s wife said: “That’s very interesting, Ann.” And the conversation closed above my head, leaving me happy to rattle around in my own altered state.

  Later, at home, Thorne said: “Whatever made you say what you said at dinner tonight?”

  I said, in a grave voice: “It is something I have always believed.”

  The nice thing about being high all the time is that life suspends itself in front of you endlessly, like telephone poles on a highway. Without plans you have the feeling that things either will never change, or will arrange themselves somehow someday.

  A look around the campus did not fill the heart of this tender bride with visions of a rosy adult future. It was clear who was having all the fun and it was not the grown-ups. Thorne and I were the youngest faculty couple, and this gave us—I mean me—a good vantage point. A little older than us were couples with worn-out cars, sick children, and debts. If they were not saddled with these things, they had independent incomes and were saddled with attitudes. Then they got older and were seen kissing the spouses of others at parties, or were found, a pair of unassorted spouses, under a pile of coats on a bed at New Year’s Eve parties. Then they got even older, and the strife of their marriages gave them the stony affection battle comrades have for one another.

  There were marriages that seemed propped up with toothpicks, and ones in which the wife was present but functionless, like a vestigial organ. Then the husband, under the strain of being both father and more to little Emily, Matthew, and Tabitha plus teaching a full course load, was forced to have an affair with a graduate student in Boston whom he could see only every other weekend.

  The thought of Thorne and my becoming any of these people was so frightful that I had no choice but to get immediately high. Something would either occur to me, or nothing would happen. Meanwhile, time drifted by in the company of Lionel Browning—a fine fellow and a truly great pothead for whom I had not one particle of sexual feeling. He was my perfect pal. Was this cheating? I asked myself. Well, I had to admit, it sort of was. Thorne did not know how much time I spent with him, but then Linnie was soon to graduate, so I had to get him while I could, so to speak.

  In the spring, Thorne went off to a convention of the Historical Society and I went on a dope run to Boston with Linnie. I looked forward to this adventure. It did not seem likely that life would bring me many more offers of this sort. The purity of my friendship with Linnie was never tainted by the well-known number of motels that littered the road from school to Boston. Sex was never our mission.

  We paid a visit to a dealer named Marv (he called himself Uncle Marv) Fenrich, who was somewhat of a legend. The legend had it that he had once been very brilliant, but that speed—his drug of choice—had turned his brain into shaving cream and now he was fit only to deal grass to college boys. He also dealt speed to more sinister campus types, and he had tried to con Linnie into this lucrative sideline. But Linnie wanted only quality marijuana and Uncle Marv respected him, although it irked him that Linnie was not interested. He sold what he called “The Uncle Marv Exam Special—Tailored to the Needs of the College Person.” This was a box containing two 5 milligram Dexamyls, a Dexamyl Spansule (15 mgs), two Benzedrines (5 mg), and something he called an “amphetamine football”—a large, olive-green pill which he claimed was pure speed coated with Vitamin B12. On the shelves of his linen closet were jar upon hospital-size jar of pills. But his heart, if not the rest of his metabolism, was in grass, and he never shut up.

  “Man,” he said, “now this particular reefer is very sublime, really very sublime. It is the country club of grass, mellow and rich. A very handsome high can be gotten off this stuff. Now my own personal favorite cocktail is to take two or three nice dexies, wash them down with some fine whiskey or it could be Sterno or your mother’s French perfume, it makes no difference whatsoever, and then light up a huge monster reefer of the very best quality and fall on the floor thanking God in many languages. This is my own recipe for a very good time. I like to share these warm happy times with others. Often Uncle Marv suggests you do a popper or two if you feel unmotivated by any of the above. Or snap one under the nose of a loved friend. Believe me, the drugstore has a lot to offer these days. Now a hundred or so of those little Romilar pills make you writhe and think insects are crawling all over your body—some people like this sort of thing very deeply. I myself find it a cheap thrill. Say, Linnie, have you authentic college kids gotten into mescaline yet? Very attractive stuff. Yes, you may say that it is for people with no imagination, but think of it this way: if you have no imagination, a Swiss pharmaceutical company will supply one for you. Isn’t that wonderful what modern science does? Let me tell you, this stuff is going to be very big. Uncle Marv is going to make many sublime shekels off this stuff as soon as he can set it up right. You just wait and see. Uncle Marv says: the streets of Boston and Cambridge are going to be stacked with little college boys and girls hyperventilating and having visions. Now this lysergic acid is also going to be very big, very big. God bless the Swiss! Now, Linnie,” he began rooting in various desk drawers. “Now, Linnie, how about some reds for all those wired-up college boys and girls to calm down after exams? I personally feel that reds go very well after a little speed abuse and I should know. Calm you down, take the reptile right out of you. Uncle Marv is so fond of these sublime red tens.” He paused. “Seconal,” he said rather coldly to me, since it was clear even to a person who was out of his mind that I did not know what he was talking about. “I like to see a person taking reds. This is a human person, a person unafraid to admit that he or she is very nervous. You don’t want any? Well, all right. But you and this authentic college girl have not come to pass the evening in idle drug chatter. This is business. Reefer for Linnie, many shekels for Uncle Marv. Now, Linnie, this reefer in particular I want you to taste is very sublime. You and this authentic college girl must try some this very instant. Now this is Colombian loco-weed of the highest order. Of Colombian distinction and extremely handsome. I also have some horse tranquilizers, by the way. Interested? Extremely sublime. They make you lie down on the floor and whimper for help and companionship. Uncle Marv is very fond of these interesting new pills.”

  He cleared a space on his messy kitchen table and proceeded to roll several absolutely perfect joints. It was extremely sublime grass, and Linnie bought a kilo of it.

  “Linnie, it will not fail you,” Uncle Marv said. “Only the best, from me to you.” Linnie paid up, and Uncle Marv gave us each a bennie for a present, which we were very glad to have on the long ride home.

  When Thorne came back from his confe
rence, the axe, which had been poised so delicately over the back of my neck, fell. This marked the end of my old life, and the beginning of the new. Thorne had called me from Chicago—he had called all night—and I had not been home.

  “You are sleeping with Lionel Browning,” he said.

  “I never laid a hand on him,” I said.

  “That’s an interesting locution, Ann,” said Thorne. “Do you just lie there and let him run his grubby undergraduate hands all over you?”

  This was of course my cue. “Yes,” I said. “I often lie there and let almost any undergraduate run his hands all over me. Often faculty is invited, like your colleague Jack Saks. Often the chairman of the department’s wife pops over and she runs her hands all over me too.”

  The effects of the beautiful joint I had smoked only an hour and a half ago were beginning to wane. I was getting a headache. I thought about the sweet little stash I kept in my lingerie drawer—all the grass I smoked at home tasted vaguely of sachet. I was longing to go upstairs where, underneath my socks, I had a little lump of African hash. I saw my future before me—a very depressing vision. I was fifty. Grown children. Going to the hairdresser to have my hair frosted. Doing some genteel work or other—I couldn’t think what. Wearing a knit dress—the sort worn by the wife of the president of the college. Calling grimy boys from pay phones: “Hello, hello? Kenny? Steve? This is Mrs. Speizer calling. Do you have anything for me?”

  There I would be in my proper hairdo. Facing change of life and still a total pothead. Locking the bathroom door behind me to toke up. By then Thorne would be the chairman of his department somewhere.

  “That wife of mine,” he would say—of course he only spoke this way in my fantasies—“does say the oddest things. Can’t keep track of where that mind of hers is meandering to. Goes out at odd hours and what funny boys she gets to do the lawn work. I can’t imagine where she gets them from.”